Ars Magicka - I own tons of books, they are awesome, but the game system is waaaaay too complicated for my group so it is a private love.

Birthright - Played it intensly for a brief period of time. Really cool setting and the unique game elements (modes?) opened my eyes to the wonderous potential of the traditional D&D end-game (rulers/landowners/war/politics), something I had absolutely no interesting in before playing Birthright. More people should play this.

D&D actually. I learned on Marvel superheroes from my friend's older brother (and his friends) but they reserved D&D for "them" only.

No one in my same age group was a D&D player until I got to college. By then, it seemed like everyone was gravitating away from the game and onto things like Vampire, and a slew of other games I had no interest in.

I owned but never played Swordbearer, though I always wanted to. Never played Runequest, even though I had that gorgeous red hardcover edition. Also, I wish I'd played Alma Mater more than once, just to see if it could be made to work.

Talislanta! Wonderful world with decent rules. Thankfully, most books and supplements are available as free downloads now. It still remains difficult to recruit players for it. Perhaps it will remain a fantastic setting I can mine ideas from.

Empire of the Petal Throne. Only ever played in one session of it. It was actually one of the few games I never bothered to pick up at the time, probably because of the horrendous price tag (US$25; which was US$15 more expensive than D&D at the time).

Although I did later pick up later versions of games set in Tekumel, such as the TOME and GOO games.

[Although true regret is a modern thing for me; I have many games that I really want to try out, that I doubt I will ever get the opportunity to do so. Even worse, if I do, I probably wont be able to "play" in them as I will be the one running them. Which while fun, isn't the same thing at all.]

In one sense I don't have any regrets, though from what has been shared so far, I suppose I do have a regret for not looking into Ars Magica. I certainly have a regret for not purchasing Empire of the Petal Throne, though I do have the Different Worlds reprints, one of the original maps, and the Game Science maps. However, I've never actually tried running or playing EPT, just experimented with running other games in the setting. I also have most all of the Talislanta stuff. Same story as EPT, played with the setting but not the system.

Hmm, I suppose Villains and Vigilantes might be another thing I might wish I had played at least once.

I have long ago given up on regretting not trying more games. The number of games out there is just impossible to keep up with.

Traveller: one of our group bought it ca.1984, but no one had ideas right away, and we went back to AD&D. I bought reprints last year, but haven't formed a group yet.

Star Trek (FASA): we actually played it a little, but most of my group had turned anti-SF by then, and we couldn't come up with adventure ideas good enough to overcome that. I wish we could have done more.

MERP - Love the High Fantasy setting, but our group was already involved with several other RPGs (AD&D, Boot Hill, TW2K, WFRP, Gamma World - loved that two-headed mutant chicken!!!) and most of the other members of my gaming circle were more into Dragonlance than Tolkien.

Never did more than flip though the books at the local hobby shop. From what I understand a lot of the original material is now quite difficult to come by :(

Bushido. Never got to play it, always hugely intrigued. Ditto EPT, Mage, RQ, Space 1889, BESM. Nowadays I'd like to get a designer's eye on Mechwarrior, WFRP, Top Secret, Morrow Project, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life With Master, Indiana Jones RPG, Savage Worlds, and see what makes them tick/distinctive, because I've had idiosyncratic ideas about system design since forever, and frequently discounted things just because.

And I'd like to have a fresh go, now I'm all growed up, at T&T, Vampire, Doctor Who and Bunnies & Burrows, to try to excavate what they actually intended, rather than to play whatever the popular wisdom thought they were.

AD&D. There was a long period (late teens to late 20's, roughly corresponding with AD&D 2nd ed.) when I felt playing such an inferior, mechanically broken system was beneath me, and mere dungeon-delving was a juvenile waste of time. The problem being, very few of the other gamers around me were so discriminating, so I ended up shut out of most at-the-table experience. I ended up being the guy who read a lot of game books on my own, occasionally managed to convince some folks to let me GM one of the "weird" games I liked, but almost never got to actually play a character.

I am slowly ticking through my list of games I have always wanted to play. Currently, we are playing 1E Gamma World. Next I would like to pick up Traveller (also 1E). We started a few Traveller games back in the day, but never really finished.

Sometime I plan to actually play some Mythus as well.

As for games I want to play, but probably never will... Pendragon and Bushido.

DC Heroes - I used to play lots of Marvel, and even some Palladium Heroes (later Champions), but when I was at my height of super heroes gaming I played Marvel. A player of mine had gotten DC and wanted to try it. I wasn't in the mood to learn a new game, and Marvel was fine for me so I didn't try it. Years later; I'm on the net and reading about super heroes RPGs, and read how DC was in fact a well designed game. I hunted down some PDF copies to read. It looks pretty good. I now wish I had tried it, and maybe even converted my game over to it.

I also wish I hadn't stuck playing Basic D&D as long as I did, and had gone 1e sooner. And wish I had realized the big difference between 1e and 2e, and had stayed playing 1e for games I ran. I didn't like 2e over-all and it had me stop playing RPGs for a few years until just before 3e came out.

This is difficult, since I've played a lot of games over the years. Since I worked at a game store for a number of years, I had lots of opportunities. That said, though, I missed out on, and regret missing, Birthright (which I own, but never got to play in), Dark Sun (same situation), Lace & Steel (same… actually, all of these I mention are ones I own but have never been able to play, due to a lack of group interest) and for that matter Albedo, Wraith: The Oblivion, GURPS Goblins, Empire of the Petal Throne (any version, though I only own the Different Worlds reprints and several of the Adventures in Tékumel volumes), and Swordbearer. I've played, but not to any sort of conclusion, Pendragon, Chivalry & Sorcery, and Realms of the Unknown, and I'd like to play them more fully (though I'd need to heavily house-rule the last to resolve some of my reservations about it - heavily enough that I'd be pretty much writing a new game, which I may yet do).

I'm sure that there are others, but that's what I can think of offhand.

This is a hard topic for me too, and of course complicated by what I ran, rather than got to play in. But James asked, what did we *choose* not to *play*, that we regret now? And that's a very specific question, so I'll try to answer it as stated.

I played with enough groups that I probably could've persuaded someone to run almost anything, so if I let a game slip by, I suppose I was choosing not to play it. With that in mind:

I chose not to play WEG's Star Wars. I wasn't really into the movies back then. Now I think I would've enjoyed the game.

I chose not to play WFRP, just because we played so many fantasy games already. I know now that I would've loved it, and hope for another chance.

But there are plenty of games I wish I got to play, that I GM'd. And plenty of games we didn't play enough, through no fault of my own, that I wish we'd got to play more of.

Baron Greystone: Good point. I'd have to revise my answer, then. I've never regretted any game I chose not to play. There are few enough of those: FATAL and Empire of Satanis are the only two that come to mind immediately. I don't regret choosing not to play those.

Oh, maybe I regret choosing not to play Earthdawn, though it was a choice between that and another game and then the opportunity never arising again rather than an active disavowal of Earthdawn itself. But I don't regret it a lot.

I regret never having played Boot Hill or Star Frontiers. I've always wanted to play both of those games but never had the chance to do so. It would be great to get in a game of one of those at some time.

The game I've played but wish I could have played more was Call of Cthulu. I really liked that game but for a variety of reasons I never got to play as much. When I'd run a game, it always seem to break up too quickly. *sigh*

Yeah, Runequest has languished on my shelf for years, due to uynfair neglect on my part. Dying Earth still languishes due to outrageous lack of interest by ALL of my gaming peers. Old-school D&D of every stripe languishes due to being old-school (thanks again, philistine co-gamers)...

Ragnardbard: I understand your pain as regards old-school gaming. Though most of my gaming group is interested in giving it a try (again, in most cases, for the first time in others), there is one player who is extremely opposed to the idea of even trying it out. He claims that he has been "abused" by old-school games in the past, which seems to be a line from out of the Story Game movement. It's most absurd because pretty much all of the goals he sets for story games are the same, in my opinion, as those for old-school ones, with only the perspective changed. Tribal identification can be powerful, I suppose.

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